The invention relates to a method and apparatus for providing an uplink over an access ring comprising access devices and at least one aggregation device.
Service providers deploy in many cases network access in rings such as fibre rings to save fibre utilization while providing redundancy at the same time. Further it is desirable to have an option of dual homing those access rings to diverse termination points or clients. Further, conventional ring protection protocols as used for example in Ethernet access rings are complex and require an active participation from all nodes or access devices on the access ring. Some implementations of existing ring protection protocols are proprietary thus prohibiting use of different vendors for access and aggregation equipment. Standard 802.1 IEEE implementations and even the so-called rapid spanning tree protocol RSTP are too slow to meet common 50 ms failover requirements. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and an apparatus for providing an uplink over a shared access ring topology that may be homed to diverse aggregation devices.